Emma’s Acres is an agricultural, social enterprise whose leadership includes people who were formerly incarcerated. This aspiring organic farm supplies naturally grown, non-spray produce year-round. They employ and support victims of crime as well as people currently and formerly incarcerated, through programs, sales, and green space. During growing seasons, the farm provides food for families of incarcerated people, and low-income families living in the food-insecure city of Mission. Through this work, people on conditional release have an opportunity to learn to grow their own food, participating in an unstigmatized environment while gaining experience managing a garden from seed to sale.
Much of this community, for well over a year now, has been kept inside prison on actual lockdown.
This series of poems germinates from Mercedes Eng and Cecily Nicholson’s volunteer work for Emma’s Acres during the pandemic. Mutual aid practices of community-building agriculture—the advance of intellectual and physical skill despite episodic and chronic illness, duress, and dissociative relationships to time—has come by way of practical tasks such as weeding, fertilizing, watering, planting, and picking. Efforts to ground our, at times, failing minds and bodies, within a collective productivity, has manifested in beautiful food and allegorical and experiential learning—surprising, at this difficult time. Poetry work is a necessary documenting and honouring practice in this place as we plant toward abolitionist futures.
Last spring I didn’t want to live anymore and then we started going to the farm once a week. The farm is in the City of Mission, named after the colonial mission church, and is nestled between the Nestlé sales office in Port Coquitlam and the corporation’s bottling factory in Hope, where it takes water from the Kawkawa Lake aquifer. Every week the farm was the only place my mind stopped moving like a rock skipping across water and I was present in this thing called a body. Every week a new thing to learn, taught by Nyki, Shay, and Zach in field greenhouse chicken coop. Every week in a teeny way I helped grow this stuff we all need to live but don’t all have access to.
we start in the strawberry patch
strawberry runner razor wire
chain-link fences my natal occasion
strawberry is reason is way is
temporary freedom berry
strawberries are indigenous to this land mass
currently called North American
Indigenous peoples use flower leaf and fruit
for food and medicine
heart shaped berry good for heart health
antioxidant properties low in calories salt sugar
top ten superfood for a diabetes meal plan
the strawberry is a member of the rose family
the first time I have kombucha is because a friend brought it to our picnic and it is rose flavoured and I love it I give in I buy others flavors of kombucha I’m not into other flavours but continue to buy the rose one later learning that rose is good for depression so I’m not a jerk spending $5 on a low-fizz fermented tea drink I’m just attending to my mental health. the rose kombucha is made by the company that makes the maple syrup and blueberry kombucha that Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes about in a short story “unsubstantiated health benefits” about how many Indigenous peoples lack food sovereignty, don’t have access to traditional Indigenous foods like maple syrup and blueberries, another antioxidant superfood, but yet people and people who can afford $5 drinks do
we move to the tomatoes in the greenhouse
learn their parts learn to be merciless
in pruning to give the fruit a better chance
this is the crop we work the most work, for months
at their most lush the plants are 8 feet tall
when they outgrow the support frames
we loop them over the top of the frames
effectively unintentionally
building a nearly impenetrable spider habitat
that has me shrieking at every spider encounter
which occurs at every plant
after this loud greeting
I tell the spiders:
I will move
so you don’t have to
holy shit am I stating the obvious but
it is hot as fuck in the greenhouse in August
and sometimes when I stand up I feel light-headed
like I did back when I was underweight
at the end of the growing season
we are honoured
with the task of taking down the tomatoes
to pick the last of the fruit ripe and not
then to remove the thick vines
cut cut cut thank you thank you thank you
we shovel chicken manure over the tomato beds
to feed the soil and it is
the worst smell I have ever smelled
Image description: In the garden, just above the staked tomato plants, a hand peeks into view. The fingers and thumb are stained grey-green past the first knuckle with tomato tar and dusted lightly with yellow pollen. The thumb and forefinger gently hold up two vibrant tomato blossoms, green sepals and stems covered in shimmering white tangles of fuzz. In one flower, the stamen is just about to open, and in the other, the stamen is unfurling and uncurling.
Above: Cecily Nicholson, Peppers, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
Image description: A shallow grey ceramic bowl with crackled glaze rests on a wooden table. Light from a window pours in, creating bright spots on the glaze. Within the bowl, an assortment of chilli peppers in a range of sizes and a rainbow of colors. Some are solid, while others are striped or tinted with a gradient, one color at the tip, melting into another color as it moves up to the stem: pale yellow, green and yellow, green and red, deep purple, orange, lilac, and red. Leaning at the front of the bowl is a list of the pepper types hand-written on lined paper in thick, black marker: “Fish, Black Hungarian, Buena Mulata, Hinklehatz, Sugar rush peach, Carolina reaper.”
it smells like death
I sprint out of the greenhouse several times
about to vomit from the smell
that night I dream about the smell
when we feed the chickens
the roosters are so pushy
I wanna kick them threaten to
work hard to make sure the hens get food
get it mama get it
angry at the patriarchy in this chicken coop
but one week one of the roosters is missing feathers
from its neck and the next week the neck is bald
and when Cecily goes to get the feed
from the repurposed mini deep-freezer
bald neck jumps right in it and starts eating
desperate for food
and I feel for him
remember to honour his part in the process of egg making
one of the older hens isn’t fast enough to get food
we run ruses to distract the other chickens succeeding
and she eats and then she doesn’t and she is euthanized
and we bury her and she is going to feed
the hawthorn bushes we removed and replanted
the hawthorn is a member of the rose family too
flowers of plants in the rose family are
generally described as showy
are symmetrical and almost always hermaphroditic
as are tomatoes
solitary flowers are rare
this year we are earlier to the farm in the growing cycle
get to plant tomato seeds that germinate
in a mini greenhouse within the greenhouse
get to plant the tomato seedlings in the rows we fertilized
when you have to clean the chicken coop and first check for eggs and the mama who just laid an egg doesn’t wanna move but you have to move her to clean her house and you pick up the egg and it is still warm and mama is in distress, you understand the everyday miracle this egg is and you love this hen who’s feeding you and you also feel hope
Image description: Two arms reach out toward the camera, fingernails long, palms turned up and cupping five pastel chicken eggs: pink, green, orange, and speckled orange. The eggs are fresh from the henhouse, with smudges of brown across the shells. The person stands facing the camera on a spot covered with straw.
i.
Somatically my body remembers farming as a rurally entrenched kid—where I lived cultivated punctuated by occasional bush and ditches that weren’t much at all like these rolling hills songed in mission bells in reach of cemetery lawns across the road away
and yet it feels familiar
Playground fields to former wards as a youth intermittently involved state care that cared less – I cared more, and for more, around me
la paperson observes we cannot reckon with, “how Black people are often confronted by the impossibility of settlement, because antiblackness positions Black people as ‘out of place’ on land.”
“Where have I been a settler?” where I am
Returning to efforts of cultivation I think on Vicky Mochama’s discussion of mutual aid and her reminder about practices that are not new rather, are long-standing traditions instilled in Black community and experience. I consider Paul Taylor’s organizing on food insecurity, problems that cannot be answered with “casseroles and cooperatives” given global systems serving riches impoverishing labour.
Herein my reallocated labour
ii.
Passages via free gardens Fish pepper plants made way to chesepiooc table settings
Horace Pippin, a painter, gave seeds to H. Ralph Weaver, a beekeeper
Light render and pollination, I sleep not enough or too long dreaming half-awake
An array matures green to red the hottest though even orange streaked-bloody mid-section tangles at the measure the presence—twilight
fertility and life I could never hold in me springs from thumbs a perfectly verdant ancestry
Simmering young pale peppers’ invisible heat coveted cream sauces tops
hence the name, the first time, shimmery and feminine
Heat a subjective test, one for sensitive one prickly once flaring at the hip all in all
A farm that is a good teacher, farming out from under the heat, abiding in trenches
iii.
Once honeybees, pigs outside pens, vegetables fenced in loam turned casings A scrape of sprays inhumane scovilles across eyes law-enforcement-grade the indecent haste of colony
Include number of hours working for wages working overtime alone or in partnership working directly towards the operation of a farm with/out formal pay arrangements (e.g. assisting in seeding, doing accounts)
to hold a blistering Carolina Reaper in repose
The drive is roads getting smaller and murmurs of blackbirds—two eagles a branch roadside purchases, coops, and pick your own pacing another year on
Those seedlings six now eight feet a witness to irrigation heirloom systems of runners climbing rows string poles for espalier scaffold
iv.
American Fork & Hoe trenching shovel, black wheelbarrow temper hauling wood chips was nice and after
As if we will last through this latest, next crises—we try then resplendent, sympathetic—confident lungs finally wail the grief pulse a leaf of sky-green never to be seen—it moves somehow
Is it the sky or is it the planet
Sown berm a surge the dirt is land is soil is a great teacher
Fray against form our bodies resist as a matter of practice
harrowing
wells kept in wells, liberation to lifers
burst of cells bust of lings tamp the surface
tender watery gnarls, irrigation systems find roots
as they’ve found us
with our fistfuls of vegetable shapes caked in dirt
vivid serotonin sun sources—for a tired body can sleep
Grit from under nail fingerprints’ relief against tomato blood lost blooms for days endorphins a cloudy crimson a three-pepper hot sauce in a citrus brine
in the cupboard those smoked peppers from last fall infused with a snip of lilac my home and its kitchen no longer far
almost summer our great hearts I open onto every day we open
Mercedes Xuě méi Eng is the author of Mercenary English, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the BC Poetry Prize, and my yt mama. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, Asian American Literary Review, The Abolitionist, r/ally (No One Is Illegal), and Survaillance and M’aidez (Press Release).
Cecily Nicholson is the author of Triage, From the Poplars, winner of the BC Poetry Prize, and Wayside Sang which won the Governor General’s award for English-language poetry. She volunteers with communities impacted by carcerality and works in gallery education. Cecily was the 2021 Writerin-Residence for the University of Windsor.
This article is published in issue 38.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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